As a competitive, modern entrepreneur who would love to see his franchise dreams “blow up,” he struggles with his ambition and his morals. “I’ve heard the term used before that if your competitor is drowning, you don’t reach for them. You stick a funnel in their throat and pour a five-gallon bucket of water down. And so, that’s hard for me to—we have to look at the faith end of—I look at this as a bigger picture. So, people are looking at me, OK, he’s a businessman or whatever. But what’s his integrity? And that’s bigger for me. I would rather, if I have to lose this business, be known as a person who has integrity versus if I had to cheat and do anything like that because it’s not worth it. And I’m not going to lose that, not so much reputation and impressing men, but to know my beliefs and my faith. I answer to a higher power. I answer to God, so I’ve got to do what’s right.”
5
DEFINING YOUR TERMS
* * *
THE WRITER-PHILOSOPHER-HISTORIAN VOLTAIRE wrote, “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.” It is a good rule but not an easy one to follow if the term is junk. Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster dictionary, observes that the word junk is a bit unusual. “Junk is one of those words in English that’s just an English word.” Junk doesn’t have some strange history like the word “tragedy,” whose origins have something to do with goats, or “muscle,” which comes from the Latin musculus which means “little mouse” because biceps were thought to resemble squirming mice under the skin. Sokolowski says about junk, “There’s no convoluted history.”
Junk was the original name for reused rope or cable on sailing ships. The Oxford English Dictionary puts this first application around the fifteenth century, and this definition remained intact for centuries.1 “You may make your ship fast with any old junk” was the advice given to eighteenth-century seamen according to the OED. In a nineteenth-century guide for naval cadets a nuance appears. A differentiation is made between good junk and bad junk. The good stuff was from old cables and the bad came from cord that was no longer up to the task of binding or holding anything together. In the guide a note was made that sailors should look carefully because twice-laid rope made from hand yarns could be useable, but to beware because they could also be “made up from junk, or condemned rigging and worthless.”2
It was around this time that junk went from referring to spent bits of rope to a noun that could apply to anything value-free. The word junk experienced “meaning migration” according to English professor emeritus from the University of Maryland Jeanne Fahnestock. That’s when a word’s original meaning organically evolves. Fahnestock says, “Users extended the term to non objects, so now that even ideas, comments, proposals, and just about anything can be labeled junk in informal contexts.” She goes on to add it has even changed forms. “By conversion, the term was also pressed into service as a verb, ‘to junk.’”3 Over time, as wordsmiths played with sentence structure, in addition to something being classified as junk, junkiness could also be an object’s identifying characteristic or become a compound noun, as in the case of junk mail, junk science, junk bonds, and junk food.
Junk Food
Labeling snacks, drinks, and even meals as junk food has been attributed to Dr. Michael Jacobson, PhD, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). One source says the term was casually used in the 1960s, but Dr. Jacobson is the man who popularized and legitimized it. The way he remembers it, “I suspect that the truth of the matter is that people had been using the term junk food in ordinary conversation, but I apparently was the first one to put it in print around 1972,” shortly after he cofounded CSPI. Jacobson’s focus was educating the public about nutrition and food safety. He began to publicly call out certain eats as junk food, specifically fare with no or low nutritional value and, in his words, “Products like diet soda that are not high in calories but are concoctions of a raft of worthless chemicals.”
Junk Bonds
After the fall of financier Michael Milken in the 1980s, junk bond was a common term. Milken and his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., discovered there was money to be made on newly issued bonds with dodgy credit that offered high yields. Investments that once had stellar credit but had lost their luster had been around for years and were known by a much lovelier name, “fallen angels.”
These new investments had iffy reserves from the get-go. The actual connection of “junk” to “bond” was used by the Wall Street Journal on March 27, 1975, in an article titled “One Man’s Junk Is Another Man’s Bonanza.” The writer describes the investment folks involved in this racket as “junk traders and dealers,” but it isn’t until the fifth paragraph that the words junk and bond find one another. For years, junk bond would appear in print as “junk” bond or “junk bond,” but by the mid 1990s all need to qualify the term was gone.
Junk Science
Calling a finding junk science is a way to describe data or evidence that was not developed using solid scientific methodology, unsupported by peer group analysis, or science that has been misused or become outdated. The term has become a political football and a legal sand trap. Sometimes opposing sides manipulate and cherry-pick science to support a certain view. The book Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom brought the term junk science into the nomenclature in the early 1990s. The book’s title refers to astronomer and physicist Galileo, who was put on trial in 1633 and convicted of heresy for daring to suggest the Earth revolved around the sun.
The possibility of junk science going unquestioned led to a recent dramatic change in Texas law. Texas is the only state in the country with what is often referred to as “junk science legislation” on the books. The statute, SB344, went into effect in 2013 and allows people who have been convicted to have another day in court if there is evidence that questionable science was used to convict them, if an advancement in science disproves some evidence which led directly to their conviction, or if there is proof that questionable expert testimony based on now-bad science lead to a conclusion of guilt. At least four people have been released from prison since the law went into effect.
Harvard scholar, scientist, and journalist John Bohannon recently exposed the amount of junk science and unchecked science being touted as the real thing. In 2013, over a period of ten months, he submitted an incredibly flawed article about a cancer wonder-drug to a host of open-source online journals. When I asked him how warped the paper was, he let out a rueful chuckle. “The paper was so bad. You want to talk about junk science. The paper was absolutely trash.” He used a fake name and passed himself off as a scientist named Ocorrafoo Cobange from the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. A twenty-second web search reveals that Asmara exists—it is the capital of Eritrea—but the Wassee Institute does not. Of the 304 open-source journals that received the paper, 157—roughly 50 percent—published it. It blew Bohannon’s mind. “I made sure there is enough bad science, I don’t care how lazy you are, if you are a real scientist and you read this paper you would never accept it for publication. The data did not support the conclusion and I didn’t use the right controls at all. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes to know this is a bad paper.”
After the initial shock of it all he became deeply disturbed by the brazenness of these journals that ask scientists to pay to be published and whose editors clearly do not care about the quality of the content. “It’s really depressing.” His tone was noticeably grim. “What we all want is to trust science, because science itself is based on trust. That’s how this whole thing works: we trust each other! If I do a particular experiment, you shouldn’t have to wonder if I did the experiment if my analysis and data holds up.” He went on to add, “The problem with junk science and junk journals that publish it is it is polluting the pool of knowledge. The longer this goes on the more everything is getting degraded. We are losing trust in what scientists are saying.”
Junk Mail
“Junk Mail Stirs the Ire of Congress” was an article in the Decem
ber 26, 1954, edition of the New York Times. Now a lot was going on in this country in 1954: School desegregation. McCarthyism. The first US nuclear sub was commissioned. Yet junk mail had the country and Congress in fits. What started as a fifteen-month trial to fill the post office coffers wound up as a mid-century smack down that gave birth to the term “junk mail.”
Certain businesses always had what were called sucker lists. Dating back decades, an entrepreneur or company could purchase a list of people to whom they could send enticements. It was early direct marketing. The catch was that all of this type of mail—these “circulars, catalogs, printed matter, and merchandise supplies”—was sent out at a different postal rate than letters or newspapers.4 It was called third-class bulk mail and it needed to have an actual address on it, which is why you needed the sucker’s name and information.
In an effort to reduce a deficit, on August 21, 1953, the postmaster general allowed an extension of a practice that already took place in rural communities where there wasn’t door-to-door delivery. The 1953 plan allowed a business to send to the post office as many circulars or flyers as were on a given route. The mail didn’t have to be specifically addressed. It could say Occupant, Patron, Household, or Addressee. The mail carrier would just leave it with the rest of the person’s mail. Less time sorting and increased use could lead to some much-needed cash for the postal service, which dubbed it “patron mail.”
Politicians called it “a countrywide headache.”5 At the time post office policy was dictated by Congress, and it listened to its constituents. People threatened boycotts. Unions got involved. A letter to the editor of a local paper questioned the practice: “Has anything been made public about the analysis of the New York Post Master concerning late delivery of mail and whether or not this is being made worse by ‘junk mail’—3rd class bulk mailings without addresses?” It was signed Cranston Williams, Newspaper Publishers Association, and dated December 7, 1954. You’ll notice Mr. Williams’s job title. The newspaper lobby hated patron mail. It believed patron mail was robbing papers of advertising dollars, essentially bypassing the middleman, the print advertising section. The lobby was behind much of the bad press about the ruling and it started to refer to the mailings as junk mail.6
From coast to coast, local municipalities big and small are still trying to fight junk mail. In the fall of 2014, New York City rolled out a Stop Junk Mail campaign in conjunction with Green NYC. The city’s sanitation commissioner told a crowd at Union Square Park, “We have two billion pieces of junk mail delivered to New Yorkers every year, and a huge amount of that still does end up in landfills.”7 An environmental advocacy group called 41 Pounds (www.41pounds.org), after the amount of junk mail it claims one person receives each year, will contact direct marketers on your behalf to have you removed from lists—for a price. It hopes eliminating junk mail will reduce the number of trees and the amount water used to make paper that winds up being tossed out. There are other websites that will provide a similar service for free. Even two of the US government’s own agencies, the EPA and the FTC, have webpages dedicated to rolling back the tide of junk mail. Meanwhile, their half-sibling agency, the independently financed US Post Office, recently launched “a new integrated marketing campaign to promote easy-to-use and affordable direct mail and shipping services to America’s small business.” So while the government gives and takes away physical junk mail, we as individuals are left to deal with perhaps the most invasive and unregulated type of junk mail of all.
Spam
If you look right now at the junk or spam folder of your e-mail account, it is likely full of offers from online retailers you’ve frequented. Or you will see outrageous subject lines like: G-U_C..C..I -..W-A-T_C_H_E S--_A..T-_ C..H_E A-P-_..P_R I_C E. This unsolicited junk e-mail is called spam after a Monty Python skit set in a small restaurant. The waitress, a hearty fellow in drag using a falsetto, repeatedly announces what’s on the menu. Almost everything has spam in it. Everything. The waitress starts reading off the list. “Well, there’s eggs and bacon. Eggs, sausage, and bacon. We have eggs and spam. Eggs, bacon, and spam. Eggs, bacon, sausage, and spam. Spam, bacon, sausage, and spam. Spam, eggs, spam, spam, bacon, and spam. Spam, spam, eggs, and spam, spam, spam, spam. Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam, and spam . . .” Some Vikings who also happen to be eating at the diner (because it is Monty Python after all) seem delighted by the menu and start chanting a song about spam, “Spam, spam, spam, spam . . .” for a good two minutes. At one point an old lady shrieks, “I don’t like spam!” yet everyone keeps saying it. It pretty much defines how people feel about unsolicited incoming e-mail.
The use of the word spam to describe a repeated, unwanted message was popularized in 1993 when a user accidently generated around two hundred messages on a user board. One of the peeved receivers was a witty writer and software trainer, Joel Furr, who called the influx Spam, and the name stuck. But the first actual unsolicited e-mail coming directly into someone’s inbox dated back fifteen years earlier. Who would think of such a bizarre scheme?
Gary Thuerk would. He made history on May 3, 1978, when he sent out an unsolicited mass e-mail that has now earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who sent the first junk e-mail. Years later Thuerk recalls he was having an ordinary day at work until he noticed a young man looking at him quizzically as he read a magazine article about the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. Thuerk remembers the conversation vividly: “He says, ‘Oh, well, this says you sent the first e-mail spam back in such-and-such.’ I went, ‘Let me see that.’ That was PC World. So that was their twentieth anniversary issue. And that was like 2003 or 2004, something like that. And that was when I got exposed and all of this came up. So, I had told some of these young whippersnappers, I said, ‘Hey, you’d better be nice to me. I was one of the original spammers.’ And they look at me like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Then all of a sudden like, ‘Oh, it’s the father, the padre, the grandfather of it.’”
Thuerk, who is funny, energetic, intelligent, nerdy, clear-eyed, and now in his golden years, must have been a dynamo four-plus decades ago when he was working as a marketing manager for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). He had a strong grasp of the technology and its possibilities. The 1970s were an exciting time in the history of computer science and the Internet. Apple Computers had just been founded. These new networks connecting universities and research sites were creating all kinds of new needs. Thuerk was helping develop and market commercial-grade support products for the evolving field of e-communication.
“I wanted to tell people about a wonderful new product that I thought up. The product was coming and we had a plan to get the word out. This was in the day when a long-distance phone call was a big deal. At the time there were only about twenty-six hundred people on the ARPANET.” He laughs at how small and antiquated it seems.
Thuerk describes almost every detail of that time over coffee in the clubhouse lounge of his retirement community in the Southwest. He recounts the days leading up to his creating something that is now so ubiquitous it is responsible for 70 percent of e-mail traffic: “So, I got out the ARPANET directory, or like you’d call a phone book, and a yellow marker.” He found the names of four hundred people he thought might be interested in his new product. “My product manager, he got to type in all the addresses while I wrote the invitation.” It took as long to type in all the names as it did for him to create the invite. Thuerk opted for all caps. He wanted it to feel like an invitation to a wedding reception, familiar with a hint of expectation.
Mail-from: DEC-MARLBORO rcvd at 3-May-78 0955-PDT
DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE DECSYSTEM-10
NG SYSTEM.
THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040
AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.
WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:
TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 – 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA
THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 – 2 PM
DUNFEY’S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA
(4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)
A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND,
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.
At that time the ARPANET was not supposed to be for commercial purposes. It was funded by a branch of the military and national Department of Defense to improve communication and research. When the DoD got wind of this rogue missive a high-ranking official called and chewed out Thuerk’s boss—who wasn’t angry, by the way. Not everybody complained. One engineer told him, “He said, I’d rather get this than the junk e-mails we get coming around telling me about somebody’s party.” The engineers at one university were not happy at all to find that the e-mail had clogged the server and the administrators had to delete the unsolicited e-mails one at a time.
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